On Patchwork

I picked up this short treatise today because Mencius Moldbug — Curtis Yarvin — has been getting a lot of traction lately and I’d never actually read anything he published. Given recent events in American politics (you can tell from the date when I’m posting this), it seemed like time, and it pairs well with Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, which feels more relevant than ever.

I’ll start by saying I agree with Yarvin on parts of his negative critique of modern political theory. He’s right that the sovereign is whatever stands above the law. American politics frames itself as an immanent system in which everyone, whatever their position, is subject to the law, and only the Constitution is transcendent, only the Constitution has the final say. But that doesn’t hold water. The Constitution is a text, and everyone who holds power — judicial, legislative, executive — interprets it; it’s the interpreting that gives the document teeth. The Constitution doesn’t transcend the system so much as serve as a tool for marshaling power, one the branches are happy to turn against each other, with the Supreme Court ostensibly the final say, ostensibly the sovereign. And Yarvin is right that the American electoral system means the people, on some level, stand above politics — by voting they install legislators and presidents who can pack the courts and make new laws. Higher still, though, is the military: it holds the monopoly on violence, and only by recusing itself from politics does “the people,” as an abstraction, get to be sovereign. None of which changes the fact that, when push comes to shove, the military is the most powerful part of any political system, which is why leaders work so hard to drive wedges into it and coup-proof their states. He’s also right that what defines liberal democracies is the priority they give moral responsibility over every other kind — he sets fiscal responsibility against it as a counterpoint.

So Yarvin is right about a great deal of his critique of liberal politics. His positive vision, however, is utterly reprehensible. My quarrel with him isn’t really a matter of marshaling facts; it’s a divergence of values. His argument hinges on the view that the two most important components of good governance are security and prosperity. The United States today holds a contradictory set of values — security and prosperity, but also liberty and some measure of egalitarianism — and the question becomes how you rank them. Mine would run something like:

1. Egalitarianism
2. Prosperity
3. Liberty
4. Security

Yarvin’s runs more like:

1. Security
2. Prosperity
3. Liberty
4. Egalitarianism

His ideal state is one where people prosper and never have to fear crime; mine is one where people are treated equally, and (not even on my original list) with dignity. Over-securitization neuters the things that matter most to me. Worse still, his actual picture of this is nothing short of dystopian. Each “state” is not a nation-state as we’d recognize it but something like a city-state-cum-corporate-fief, run like a capitalist firm: those who invested in the “patch,” who don’t live there, appoint a CEO to govern it as a monarch, and the board can fire and replace the CEO at any time, which makes the board sovereign. As shareholders they want the fief governed well, but they aren’t residents; residents can be expelled at any time for not contributing enough, or can leave whenever they like, if another fief will have them. The inhabitants enter private contracts with their corporate overlords, who have two reasons to govern well: to attract the most productive and well-behaved inhabitants, and to turn a profit (or is it rent?). Rule like a tyrant and your reputation precedes you and scares off the serfs. The serfs, for their part, are obligated to be upstanding — and if no fief will take them, Yarvin suggests they be imprisoned and uploaded into the metaverse to live out their lives without affecting anyone, or, alternatively, ground up and turned into biofuel. Woof.

The power relation here, as in all states, is asymmetric, but the room to control one’s own life is far smaller than under liberal democracy, in theory or in practice. A serf can, unlike under classical feudalism, pick up and leave at any time — but with what? Will each board issue its own cryptocurrency, making exchange difficult or impossible for anyone not on it? It’s not impossible in Yarvin’s fantasy, given that he wants the whole fief intensely surveilled every second of every day, location and biometrics and all. And isn’t this just an exterminationist fantasy — which it is — given that we’re on the cusp of automating the majority of the workforce? This would all be beside the point if it were the work of some shitty blogger ignored on the internet. What’s alarming is that Yarvin seems to have the ear of Peter Thiel (who has invested in him) and of the new vice president, J.D. Vance — hence all the recent interviews — and that he’s influential in e/acc and r/acc circles, and in the wider world of Silicon Valley cloudalists. I don’t want to be alarmist, but this may well be the playbook of the current administration, which appears to be carrying out some kind of self-coup as I write. It’s too soon to tell exactly what’s happening, but conditions are not looking good.